Deejay, I recall in the 1990s, the head man of Jaguar US (which was purely a marketing operation) was interviewed in the trade press. He was asked to comment on US buyers of Jaguars. He said, "It's a pleasure to deal with people with such low expectations. They think it's a miracle if the car starts on a wet day." Having had a few cars with Lucas distributors, I know what he meant. On wet days, road splashes on the outside of the distributor were enough to get water inside it, and stop the car. Plus the badly plated steel clips for the fuses usually corroded after a while, and the fuses then only made intermittent contact, so when the lights went out, you had to find the fuse block in the dark and pull the fuses in and out a few times to scrape off some of the corrosion. In those days we were all so used to Lucas electrics that we regarded that as almost normal.
In the early 1970s I put a 215 cubic inch Buick aluminium V8 in an MGB, using the original Delco electrics of course. Driving it home from work one night I carelessly ran into a foot or so of water covering the road for 100 yards or so, at 40 mph. The bow wave rode up over the downsloping hood of the MGB, effectively submerging the car. I got thoroughly wet from water forcing its way between the windscreen header and the roof. All I did was declutch, wait for the car to stop, engage first gear, and drive the rest of the way to (relatively) unflooded roadway at the end of the flooded stretch. Everything continued to run perfectly, of course. No doubt the air cleaner element was dampish, but it wasn't noticeable, and it must have dried itself out before I got to the freeway, because all was well. I would have been a lot less happy attempting the same thing with the car's original BMC B engine, complete with Lucas electrics. It would have been a long wade, and I'd have needed a diesel tow truck or a very long tow rope.
